Monday, December 3, 2012

The initial effort to integrate Shotcut with the Melted video server is now available since version 12.12.03.

What is Melted video server? Basically, it is an industrial-grade media player for broadcast/linear television channels. It was the original use case and application for the MLT framework, which is also the multimedia engine for Shotcut. For many of you this will be unimportant, which is why these new features are hidden under the View menu and not given prominent location on the main toolbar. However, for the folks who are interested in Melted, this represents the first publicly available multi-platform client!

This is just the initial, basic integration. There are a couple of simple enhancements planned for the near future:

Map the server's root directory of clips to the local or network file system so that you can easily preview and trim clips and then add them to a Melted unit's playlist.

When you open a unit that streams to the network, play the stream instead of just showing black.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Shotcut received its first submission for translation to the Czech language. So, I have added support to the code and build system to support the inclusion of languages as of version 12.10.20. This has been integrated and tested on Windows and Linux. I think there is still something I need to do for OS X with plists in the app bundle to support this.

If you want to translate Shotcut first please understand that Shotcut is young and under heavy development, and you should expect many changes over the next few years. Also, the project releases a new version almost daily, and there will not be periodic calls for translation updates; you would be responsible for periodic updates. With that said, please comment here or in the discussion forum if you want to make a translation.

Update: I have since setup a Transifex project to make it easier for people to make and submit translations.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

As of version 12.09.13, the OS X build of Shotcut supports high resolution text rendering in the user interface on the new MacBook Pro with retina display. Unfortunately, it does not yet support double resolution icons, which is not too noticeable, but also extending the support to the embedded video is also still a challenge with Qt and OpenGL. We will revisit that later.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Encoding is now implemented and available since version 12.08.10. It is still young and needs additional testing and tweaking; however, it basically works on all platforms. It also supports batch encoding, but currently the control over the queue is limited to simply canceling a running job (right-click a running job to open its context menu).

When you are playing a live source, encoding acts as a capture function. That is particularly handy for the Blackmagic Design SDI/HDMI input, but on Linux you can also use it for screen recording and webcam (V4L2) and audio recording.

In addition, it also supports a streaming output as an alternative to file output, but you really need to know what you are doing to take advantage of it at this time. I have pre-populated the stream URL field to something suitable for MPEG-2 Transport Stream; so, to use that, set the format to mpegts and choose codecs that mpegts supports: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, AAC, AC-3, MP2, MP3.